Abbas fears the prisoners’ hunger strike

The Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is due to meet Donald Trump in the White House on Wednesday to discuss reviving the long-cold corpse of the peace process.

Back home, things are heating up. There is anger in the West Bank, both on the streets and within the ranks of Abbas’s Fatah movement. The trigger is a two-week-old hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners.

Last Thursday, Palestinians shuttered their businesses in a show of solidarity, and the next day youths clashed with the Israeli army in a “day of rage”.

About a quarter of the 6,500 political prisoners held by Israel – almost all of them in Israeli territory, in violation of international law – are refusing food in protest at their degrading treatment. They want reforms to Israel’s industrial system of incarceration. Some 800,000 Palestinians – 40 per cent of males – have passed through Israel’s cells since 1967.

Israel hopes to break the prisoners’ spirits. It has locked up the leaders in solitary confinement, denied striking inmates access to a lawyer, taken away radios, and last week began confiscating salt rations – the only sustenance along with water the prisoners are taking.

The strike is led by Marwan Barghouti, the most senior Palestinian leader in jail – and the most popular, according to polls.

Abbas is publicly supportive of the strikers, but in private he is said to want the protest over as quickly as possible. Reports at the weekend revealed that he had urged Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to intercede with America and Israel to help.

In part, Abbas fears the influence of Barghouti, a man often described as the Palestinian Nelson Mandela and seen as Abbas’s likely successor. Notably, the Palestinian president has repeatedly sidelined him within Fatah.

But Abbas is also concerned that the hunger strike will provoke violent clashes in the West Bank with Israeli security forces, damaging his efforts to persuade Trump to back his diplomatic campaign for Palestinian statehood.

Instead, he wants to prove he can snuff out any signs of what Trump might see as “terrorism”. That requires tight security cooperation with Israel.

The visit to Washington and the hunger strike have brought into sharp relief the biggest fault line in the Palestinian national movement.

Abbas’s strategy is strictly top-down. Its starting point is that western states – those that have consistently betrayed the Palestinian people over many decades – can now be trusted to help them attain a state.

From this dubious assumption, Abbas has sought to suppress anything that plays badly in western capitals. Pressure has only intensified under Trump.

By contrast, the “battle of empty stomachs” is evidence of a burgeoning bottom-up strategy, one of mass non-violent resistance. On this occasion, the demands are limited to prison reform, but the strike’s impact could spread.

Not least, the model of protest, should it succeed, might suggest its relevance to a Palestinian public disillusioned with Abbas’s approach. They too are living in cells of Israel’s devising, even if larger, open-air ones.

The starkly different logic of these two strategies is harder than ever to ignore.

To stand a hope of winning over the Trump administration, Abbas must persuade it that he is the sole voice of the Palestinians.

That means he must keep a lid on the hunger strike, encouraging it to fizzle out before prisoners start dying and Palestinian fury erupts across the occupied territories. His approach is reported to be creating severe tensions within Fatah.

Wishing only to add to those difficulties, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded last week that Abbas halt financial aid to the prisoners’ families, calling it compensation for terrorism.

Abbas also feels compelled to assert himself against his Hamas rivals in Gaza. That is why last week he stopped funding the fuel needed to generate electricity there, having recently cut medical services and salaries to Gaza’s civil servants.

His hope is that, as he turns the screws, Hamas will be toppled or forced to submit to his rule.

But more probably, the fissure with Hamas will deepen, forcing the cornered Islamist movement into another bloody confrontation to break free of Israel’s decade-old blockade. These divisions, most Palestinians increasingly understand, weaken rather than strengthen their cause. Mass non-violent resistance such as the hunger strike, by contrast, has the potential to reunite Fatah and Hamas in struggle, and re-empower a weary Palestinian populace.

Reports have suggested that Barghouti has reached a deal with jailed Hamas leaders committing to just such a struggle in the occupied territories once Abbas has departed.

A popular struggle of non-violence – blocking settlement roads, marching to Jerusalem, tearing down walls – would be hard to characterise as terrorism, even for Trump. It is the Israeli army’s nightmare scenario, because it is the only confrontation for which it has no suitable response.

Such a campaign of civil disobedience, however, stands no chance of success so long as Abbas is there to undermine it – and insists on obediently chasing after illusions in Washington.

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

About Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His new website is jonathan-cook.net.

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9 Responses

Trump is promising to increase foreign aid to Palestinians (even as he slashes everyone else’s). Why? Because he thinks he can use it to bolster Abbas’ autocratic regime and thereby ratchet up conflict with Israel and provoke a war. Abbas being the good Israeli stooge will no doubt oblige him. It’s so crass it would be funny if there weren’t a thousand people starving to death.

@ Amigo
Yes, many blogs, alternative news websites, twitter users are running with the slogan Trump is slashing foreign aid except he’s increasing aid to the Palestinians. None of those banners mention Israel, which got, as usual, by far the biggest foreign aid package and Trump is on public record saying he won’t be limited by that, and may increase said aid. Very frustrating. Three F-35s were recently delivered to Israel for free, at an average cost of $300 M each; they are the first installment of a total or 50 & Israel is the first country to receive them, although all others will actually pay though the nose for them. Those F-35s can fly over any country on the way to, e.g., bomb Iran and the flyover country will not even know it.

Abbas the self serving collaborator is finally in the cross hairs. How he plays this one will hopefully be the end of him and the Fatah appeasement which has enabled Israel to exercise cheap and affordable control over the Untermenschen in the West Bank. He appears to be going through the motions of “supporting” the hunger strikers and the hunger strike supporters for fear of losing all those collaborative goodies from America and Europe but very soon he will be faced with a simple and stark choice = do I walk at the front of the demonstration in support of Palestinian resistance ( no arthritic problems when it came to Charlie Hebdo ) or do I finally reveal myself as a well paid gopher for the Zios.

It is also IMHO very much a potential major turning point in the conflict.Unsurprising to see that the Yahoo is responding in traditional Gruppenfuhrer mode by withdrawing salt rations – I do believe that salt rations also featured in the Warsaw Ghetto Untermenschen control. And salt after all is yet another terrorist weapon threatening poor eternally circled, eternally victimised little Israel (quadruple sob). The hunger strike will serve to enlighten the world further with regards to the Light unto the Nations benevolent treatment of political prisoners and the role of their PA puppets and further hasten the demise of the ludicrous Oslo Accords charade.

Abbas has been in power since 2004 (march) and has spent those 12 years doing Israel,s dirty work for them.Settlements have grown faster than ever before.Abbas has spent that time lying to and pulling the wool over his people, eyes , with the explicit intention of staying in power.

It is time for the Palestinians to give this quisling his walking papers .He should be put on a boat with minimal survival equipment and supplies and pushed out to sea.Maybe his zionist comrades will take him in and reward him for his unstinting collaboration with the enemies of the Palestinian people.I wonder how much Palestinian blood this traitor has on his hands.

I’d bet that Abbas is a lot more threatened by Mahmoud Dahlan than Marwan Barghouti. Dahlan, whose thuggish allies in Gaza helped unravel the unity government in 2007, has been shopping around for backing from various Arab leaders. Over the past decade, Abbas has made many moves to keep Dahlan and his faction out of leadership in Fatah –not too difficult in the West Bank, because Dahlan hasn’t been very popular. As Cook notes, the greatest threat to the PA from the hunger strike is that Palestinians will respond violently to the death(s) of strikers. Then Netanyahu may finally get the violent intifada he’s been trying to provoke for several years. Netanyahu would love the excuse of “terrorism” to flatten the West Bank the way he flattened Jenin in the last intifada, because he still assumes that he can easily manage the narrative for America’s MSM.

I’m not that familiar with the procedure of elections over there. Did Palestinians vote for this guy? If popularity doesn’t count, what does?
I can imagine that Abbas’s meeting with Trump will also be attended by Trump’s son-in-law. That should be a one-sided conversation.

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